Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Eddie Gein

Ed Gein: The Inspiration for Buffalo Bill and Psycho

On November 17, 1957, police in Plainfield, Wisconsin arrived at
the dilapidated farmhouse of Eddie Gein, who was a suspect in the
robbery of a local hardware store and disappearance of the owner,
Bernice Worden. Gein had been the last customer at the hardware store
and had been seen loitering around the premises.

Removal of evidence at Gein's house

Gein's desolate farmhouse was a study in chaos. Inside, junk
and rotting garbage covered the floor and counters. It was almost
impossible to walk through the rooms. The smell of filth and
decomposition was overwhelming. While the local sheriff, Arthur Schley,
inspected the kitchen with his flashlight, he felt something brush
against his jacket.
When he looked up to see what it was he ran
into, he faced a large, dangling carcass hanging upside down from the
beams. The carcass had been decapitated, slit open and gutted. An ugly
sight to be sure, but a familiar one in that deer-hunting part of the
country, especially during deer season.
It took a few moments to
sink in, but soon Schley realized that it wasn't a deer at all, it was
the headless butchered body of a woman. Bernice Worden, the
fifty-year-old mother of his deputy Frank Worden, had been found.

Policeman in Ed Gein's kitchen

While the shocked deputies searched through the rubble of Eddie
Gein's existence, they realized that the horrible discoveries didn't
end at Mrs. Worden's body. They had stumbled into a death farm. The funny-looking bowl was a top of a human skull. The lampshades and wastebasket were made from human skin.
A
ghoulish inventory began to take shape: an armchair made of human skin,
female genitalia kept preserved in a shoebox, a belt made of nipples, a
human head, four noses and a heart.
The more they looked through
the house, the more ghastly trophies they found. Finally a suit made
entirely of human skin. Their heads spun as they tried to tally the
number of women that may have died at Eddie's hands.
All of this
bizarre handicraft made Eddie into a celebrity. Author Robert Bloch was
inspired to write a story about Norman Bates, a character based on
Eddie, which became the central theme of the Alfred Hitchcock's classic
thriller Psycho.

Tony Perkins as Norman Bates in the movie "Psycho"

In 1974, the classic thriller by Tobe Hooper, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,
has many Geinian touches, although there is no character that is an
exact Eddie Gein model. This movie helped put "Ghastly Gein" back in
the spotlight in the mid-1970's.
Years later, Eddie provided inspiration for the character of another serial killer, Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs. Like Eddie, Buffalo Bill treasured women's skin and wore it like clothing in some insane transvestite ritual.

The Beginning

How does a child evolve into an Eddy Gein? A close look at his childhood and home life provides a number of clues.

Eddie Gein

Edward Theodore was born on August 27, 1906, to Augusta and
George Gein in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Eddie was the second of two boys
born to the couple. The first born was Henry, who was seven years older
than Eddie.
Augusta, a fanatically religious woman, was determined
to raise the boys according to her strict moral code. Sinners inhabited
Augusta's world and she instilled in her boys the teachings of the
Bible on a daily basis. She repeatedly warned her sons of the immorality
and looseness of women, hoping to discourage any sexual desires the
boys might have had, for fear of them being cast down into hell.
Augusta
was a domineering and hard woman who believed her views of the world
were absolute and true. She had no difficulty forcefully imposing her
beliefs on her sons and husband.
George, a weak man and an
alcoholic, had no say in the raising of the boys. In fact, Augusta
despised him and saw him as a worthless creature not fit to hold down a
job, let alone care for their children. She took it upon herself to not
only raise the children according to her beliefs but also to provide for
the family financially.
She began a grocery business in La Crosse the year Eddie was born, and it
brought in a fair amount of money to support the family in a
comfortable fashion. She worked hard and saved money so that the family
could move to a more rural area away from the immorality of the city and
the sinners that inhabited it. In 1914 they moved to Plainfield,
Wisconsin to a one-hundred-ninety-five-acre farm, isolated from any evil
influences that could disrupt her family. The closest neighbors were
almost a quarter of a mile away.
Although Augusta tried diligently
to keep her sons away from the outside world, she was not entirely
successful because it was necessary for the boys to attend school.
Eddie's performance in school was average, although he excelled in
reading. It was the reading of adventure books and magazines that
stimulated Eddie's imagination and allowed him to momentarily escape
into his own world.
His schoolmates shunned Eddie because he was
effeminate and shy. He had no friends and when he attempted to make them
his mother scolded him. Although his mother's opposition to making
friends saddened Eddie, he saw her as the epitome of goodness and
followed her rigid orders the best he could.
However, Augusta was
rarely pleased with her boys and she often verbally abused them,
believing that they were destined to become failures like their father.
During their teens and throughout their early adulthood the boys
remained detached from people outside of their farmstead and had only
the company of each other.

Henry

Eddie looked up to his brother Henry and saw him as a hard worker
and a man of strong character. After the death of their father in 1940,
they took on a series of odd jobs to help financially support the farm
and their mother. Eddie tried to emulate his brother's work habits and
they both were considered by townspeople to be reliable and trustworthy.
They worked as handymen mostly, yet Eddie frequently babysat for
neighbors. It was babysitting that Eddie really enjoyed because children
were easier for him to relate to than his peers. He was in many ways
socially and emotionally retarded.
Henry was worried about Eddie's
unhealthy attachment to their mother. On several occasions Henry openly
criticized their mother, something that shocked Eddie. Eddie saw his
mother as pure goodness and was mortified that his brother did not see
her in the same way. It was possibly these incidents that led to the
untimely and mysterious death of Henry in 1944.
On May 16th Eddie
and Henry were fighting a brush fire that was burning dangerously close
to their farm. According to police, the two separated in different
directions attempting to put out the blaze. During their struggle, night
quickly approached and soon Eddie lost sight of Henry. After the blaze
was extinguished, Eddie supposedly became worried about his missing
brother and contacted the police.
The police then organized a
search party and were surprised upon reaching the farm to have Eddie
lead them directly to the "missing" Henry, who was lying dead on the
ground. The police were concerned about some of the things surrounding
Henry's death. For example, Henry was lying on a piece of earth that was
untouched by fire and he had bruises on his head.
Although Henry
was found under strange circumstances, police were quick to dismiss foul
play. No one could believe shy Eddie was capable of killing anyone,
especially his brother. Later the county coroner would list asphyxiation
as the cause of death.
The only living person Eddie had left was
his mother and that was the only person he needed. However, he would
have his mother all to himself for a very brief period.
On
December 29th, 1945, Augusta died after a series of strokes. Eddie's
foundations were shaken upon her death. Harold Schechter in his book
Deviant, explained that Eddie had "lost his only friend and one true
love. And he was absolutely alone in the world."

The downstairs living room

He remained at the farm after his mother's death and lived off
the meager earnings from odd jobs that he performed. Eddie boarded off
the rooms his mother used the most, mainly the upstairs floor, the
downstairs parlor and living room. He preserved them as a shrine to her
and left them untouched for the years to follow. He resided in the lower
level of the house making use of the kitchen area and a small room
located just off of the kitchen, which he used as a bedroom.
It
was in these areas that Eddie would spend his spare time reading
death-cult magazines and adventure stories. At other times, Eddie would
immerse himself in his bizarre hobbies that included nightly visits to
the graveyard.

Seriously Weird

After the death of his mother, Eddie became increasingly lonely.
He spent much of his spare time reading pulp magazines and anatomy
books. The rooms he inhabited were full of periodicals about Nazis,
South Sea headhunters and shipwrecks. From his readings Eddie learned
about the process of shrinking heads, exhuming corpses from graves and
the anatomy of the human body. He became obsessed with these weird
stories and he would often recount some of them to the children he
babysat. Eddie also enjoyed reading the local newspapers. His favorite
section was the obituaries.
It was from the obituaries that Eddie
would learn of the recent deaths of local women. Having never enjoyed
the company of the opposite sex, he would quench his lust by visiting
graves at night. Although he later swore to police that he never had
sexual intercourse with any of the dead women he had exhumed ("they
smelled too bad"), he did take a particular pleasure in peeling their
skin from their bodies and wearing it. He was curious to know what it
was like to have breasts and a vagina and he often dreamed of being a
woman. He was fascinated with women because of the power and hold they
had over men.
He acquired quite a collection of body parts, some
of which included preserved heads. On one occasion a young boy that he
sometimes looked after visited Eddie's farm. He later said that Eddie
had showed him human heads that he kept in his bedroom. Eddie claimed
the shriveled heads were from the South Seas, relics from headhunters.
When
the young boy told people of his experience, his story was quickly
dismissed as a figment of the young boy's imagination. Then somewhat
later, the boy was vindicated when two other young men paid a visit to
Eddie Gein's farm. They too had seen the preserved heads of women but
thought them to be just strange Halloween costumes. Rumors began to
circulate and soon most of the townspeople were gossiping about the
strange objects Eddie supposedly possessed.

Bernice Worden's Funeral

However, no one took the stories seriously until Bernice
Worden disappeared years later. In fact, people would often joke with
Eddie about having shrunken heads and Eddie would just smile or make
reference to having them in his room. No one thought he was telling the
truth or maybe they just didnt want to believe it was true.

Vanished

During the late 1940s and 1950s, Wisconsin police began to notice
an increase in missing persons cases. There were four cases that
particularly baffled police. The first was that of an eight-year-old
girl named Georgia Weckler, who had disappeared coming home from school
on May 1, 1947. Hundreds of residents and police searched an area of ten
square miles of Jefferson, Wisconsin, hoping to find the young girl.
Unfortunately, Georgia would never be seen or heard of again. There were
no good suspects and the only evidence police had to go on were tire
marks found near the place where Georgia was last seen. The tire marks
were that of a Ford. The case remained unsolved and wouldnt be opened
again until years later when Eddie Gein was convicted of murder.
Another
girl disappeared six years later in La Crosse, Wisconsin.
Fifteen-year-old Evelyn Hartley had been babysitting at the time she had
vanished. Evelyn's father repeatedly tried to phone the girl at the
house where she was babysitting and there was no answer.
Worried,
the girls father immediately drove to where she was babysitting. Nobody
answered the door. When he peered through a window, he could see one of
his daughter's shoes and a pair of her eyeglasses on the floor. He tried
to enter the house, but all the doors and windows were locked. Except
for one -- the back basement window. It was at that window where he
discovered bloodstains. Petrified, he entered the house and discovered
signs of a struggle.
Immediately he contacted police. When police
arrived at the house they found more evidence of a struggle including
blood stains on the grass leading away from the house, a bloody hand
print on a neighboring house, footprints and the girl's other shoe on
the basement floor.
A regional search was conducted but Evelyn was
nowhere to be found. A few days later police discovered some bloodied
articles of clothing that belonged to Evelyn, near a highway outside of
La Crosse. The worst was suspected.
In November of 1952, two men
stopped for a drink at a bar in Plainfield, Wisconsin before heading out
to hunt deer. Victor Travis and Ray Burgess spent several hours at the
bar before leaving. The two men and their car were never to be seen
again. A massive search was conducted but there was no trace of them.
They had simply vanished.
In the winter of 1954, a Plainfield
tavern keeper by the name of Mary Hogan mysteriously disappeared from
her place of business. Police suspected foul play when they discovered
blood on the tavern floor that trailed into the parking lot.
Police
also discovered an empty bullet cartridge on the floor. Police could
only speculate about what might have happened to Mary because like the
other four missing people, they had no bodies and little useful
evidence. The only other common tie among these cases was that all of
the disappearances happened around or in Plainfield, Wisconsin.

Skeletons in the Closet

On November 17, 1957, after the discovery of Bernice Worden's
headless corpse and other gruesome artifacts in Eddie's house, police
began an exhaustive search of the remaining parts of the farm and
surrounding land. They believed Eddie may have been involved in more
murders and that the bodies might be buried on his land, possibly those
of Georgia Weckler, Victor Travis and Ray Burgess, Evelyn Hartley and
Mary Hogan.

Clean-shaven Eddie

While excavations began at the farmstead, Eddie was being
interviewed at Wautoma County Jailhouse by investigators. Gein at first
did not admit to any of the killings. However, after more then a day of
silence he began to tell the horrible story of how he killed Mrs. Worden
and where he acquired the body parts that were found in his house. Gein
had difficulty remembering every detail, because he claimed he had been
in a dazed state at the time leading up to and during the murder. Yet,
he recalled dragging Worden's body to his Ford truck, taking the cash
register from the store and taking them back to his house. He did not
remember shooting her in the head with a .22 caliber gun, which autopsy
reports later listed as the cause of death.When asked where
the other body parts came from that were discovered in his house, he
said that he had stolen them from local graves. Eddie insisted that he
had not killed any of the people whose remains were found in his house,
with the exception of Mrs. Worden.
However, after days of intense
interrogation he finally admitted to the killing of Mary Hogan. Again,
he claimed he was in a dazed state at the time of the murder and he
could not remember exact details of what actually happened. The only
memory he had was that he had accidentally shot her.
Eddie showed
no signs of remorse or emotion during the many hours of interrogation.
When he talked about the murders and of his grave robbing escapades he
spoke very matter-of-factly, even cheerfully at times. He had no concept
of the enormity of his crimes.

A Sexual Psychopath

Gein's sanity was in question and it was suggested that during
trial he plead not guilty, by reason of insanity. Gein underwent a
battery of psychological tests, which later concluded that he was indeed
emotionally impaired. Psychologists and psychiatrists who interviewed
him asserted that he was schizophrenic and a "sexual psychopath."
His
condition was attributed to the unhealthy relationship he had with his
mother and his upbringing. Gein apparently suffered from conflicting
feelings about women, his natural sexual attraction to them and the
unnatural attitudes that his mother had instilled in him. This love-hate
feeling towards women became exaggerated and eventually developed in to
a full-blown psychosis.

Crimelab Chief Charles Wilson and District Attorney Earl Kileen

While Eddie was undergoing further interrogation and
psychological tests, investigators continued to search the land around
his farm. Police discovered within Eddie's farmhouse the remains of ten
women. Although Eddie swore that the remaining body parts of eight women
were those taken from local graveyards, police were skeptical.They
believed that it was highly possible for the remains to have come from
women Eddie may have murdered. The only way police could ascertain
whether the remains came from women's corpses was to examine the graves
that Eddie claimed he had robbed.
After much controversy about the
morality of exhuming the bodies, police were finally permitted to dig
up the graves of the women Eddie claimed to have desecrated. All of the
coffins showed clear signs of tampering. In most cases, the bodies or
parts of the bodies were missing.
There would be another discovery
on Eddie's land that would again raise the issue of whether Eddie did
in fact murder a third person. On November 29th, police unearthed human
skeletal remains on the Gein farm. It was suspected that the body was
that of Victor Travis, who had disappeared years earlier. The remains
were immediately taken to a crime lab and examined. Tests showed that
the body was not that of a male but of a large, middle-aged woman,
another graveyard souvenir.

Worden's hardware store, where evidence was collected

Try as the police did, they could not implicate Eddie in the
disappearance of Victor Travis or the three other people who had
vanished years earlier in the Plainfield area. The only murders Eddie
could be held responsible for were Bernice Worden and Mary Hogan.

Media Frenzy

When investigators revealed the facts about what was found on
Eddie Gein's farm, the news quickly spread. Reporters from all over the
world flocked to the small town of Plainfield, Wisconsin. The town
became known worldwide and Eddy Gein reached celebrity-like status.
People were repulsed, yet at the same time drawn to the atrocities that
took place on Eddie Gein's farm.
Psychologists from all over the
world attempted to find out what made Eddie tick. During the 1950s, he
gained notoriety as being one of the most famous of documented cases
involving a combination of necrophilia, transvestism and fetishism. Even
children who knew of the exploits of Eddie began to sing songs about
him and make jokes in an effort to, as Harold Schechter suggests in his
book Deviant, "exorcise the nightmare with laughter." These distasteful
jokes became known as "Geiners" and were quick to become popular around
the world.
Back in Plainfield, residents endured the onslaught of
reporters who disrupted their daily life by bombarding them with
questions about Eddie. However, many of them eventually became involved
in the mania surrounding Eddie and contributed what information they
had. Plainfield was now known to the world as the home of infamous Eddie
Gein.
Most residents who knew Eddie had only good things to say
about him, other than that he was a little peculiar, had a quirky grin
and a strange sense of humor. They never suspected him of being capable
of committing such ghastly crimes. But the truth was hard to escape. The
little shy, quiet man the town thought they knew, was in fact, a
murderer who also violated the graves of friends and relatives.

Eddie in Court

After Gein spent a period of thirty days in a mental
institution and was evaluated as mentally incompetent, he could no
longer be tried for first degree murder. The people of Plainfield
immediately voiced their anger that Eddie would not be tried for the
death of Bernice Worden. Yet, there was little the community could do to
influence the court's decision. Eddie was committed to the Central
State Hospital in Waupun, Wisconsin. Soon after Eddie was sentenced to
the mental institution, his farm went up for auction along with some of
his other belongings.� Thousands of curiosity seekers diverged
on the small town to see what possessions of Eddie's would be auctioned.
Some of the things to be auctioned off were his car, furniture and
musical instruments. The company that handled the business of selling
Eddie's goods planned to charge a fee of fifty cents to look at Eddie's
property. The citizens of Plainfield were outraged. They believed
Eddie's home was quickly becoming a "museum for the morbid" and the town
demanded something be done to put it to an end. Although the company
was later forbidden to charge an entrance fee to the auction, residents
were still not satisfied.

Eddie Gein's Farmhouse

In the early morning of March 20, 1958 the Plainfield
volunteer fire department was called to Eddie's farm. Gein's house was
on fire. The house quickly burned to the ground, as onlookers watched in
silent relief. Police believed that an arsonist was responsible for the
blaze because there was no electrical wiring problems with the house.
Although police carried out a thorough investigation, no suspect was
ever found.
When Eddie learned of the destruction to his house he simply said, "Just as well."
Although
the fire destroyed most of Eddie's belongings, there were still many
things that were salvaged. What was left of Eddie's possessions would
still be auctioned off, including farm equipment and his car. Eddie's
1949 Ford sedan, which was used to haul dead bodies, caused a bidding
war and was eventually sold for seven hundred and sixty dollars. The man
who purchased the car later put it on display at a county fair, where
thousands paid a quarter to get a peek at the Gein "ghoul car." It
seemed to the people of Plainfield that the publics fascination with
Eddie would never end.

Perfect Prisoner

After spending ten years in the mental institution where he was
recovering, the courts finally decided he was competent to stand trial.
The proceedings began on January 22, 1968, to determine whether Eddie
was guilty or not by reason of insanity, for the murder of Bernice
Worden. The actual trial began on November 7, 1968.

Eddie (R) at Age 61

Eddie looked on as seven witnesses took to the stand. Several
of those who testified were lab technicians who performed the autopsy on
Mrs. Worden, a former deputy sheriff and sheriff. Evidence was heavily
stacked against Eddie and after only one week the judge reached his
verdict. Eddie was found guilty of first-degree murder. However, because
Eddie was found to have been insane at the time of the killing, he was
later found not guilty by reason of insanity and acquitted. Soon after
the trial he was escorted back to the Central State Hospital for the
Criminally Insane.�
The families of Bernice Worden, Mary Hogan and
the families of those whose graves were robbed would never feel justice
was served. They believed Eddie escaped the punishment that was due to
him, but there was nothing more they could do to reverse the court's
decision.
Eddie would remain at the mental institution for the
rest of his life where he spent his days happily and comfortably.
Schechter describes him as the model patient:
Eddie was happy at
the hospital -- happier, perhaps, than he'd ever been in his life. He
got along well enough with the other patients, though for the most part
he kept to himself. He was eating three square meals a day (the newsmen
were struck by how much heavier Eddie looked since his arrest five years
before). He continued to be an avid reader. He like his regular chats
with the staff psychologists and enjoyed the handicraft work he was
assigned -- stone polishing, rug making, and other forms of occupational
therapy. He had even developed an interest in ham radios and had been
permitted to use the money he had earned to order an inexpensive
receiver.
All in all, he was a perfectly amiable, even docile
patient, one of the few in the hospital who never required tranquilizing
medications to keep his craziness under control. Indeed, apart from
certain peculiarities -- the disconcerting way he would stare fixedly at
nurses or any other female staff members who wandered into his line of
vision -- it was hard to tell that he was particularly crazy at all
Superintendent
Schubert told reporters that Gein was a model patient. 'If all our
patients were like him, we'd have no trouble at all.'
On July 26,
1984, he died after a long bout with cancer. He was buried in Plainfield
cemetery next to his mother, not far from the graves that he had robbed
years earlier.